Crude has fallen below $90/barrel. That’s from a peak of almost a hundred fifty.
Of course, this will be no surprise to regular readers.
[Afternoon update]
Apropo some of the comments, here’s a promising new technology for getting oil from shale and tar sands. I don’t see a price per barrel, though.
You have a short memory.
You started with the oil “peaking” at the unsustainable “high” of about $48 a barrel.
So, tell me. Do you think it will get to that level again?
According to some Oil investors I was listening to on the Radio yesterday they were fairly sure that Saudi would try their best to keep it at around $80.
So, tell me. Do you think it will get to that level again?
In inflation-adjusted terms? Sure. Once we start getting serious about drilling and shale.
According to some Oil investors I was listening to on the Radio yesterday they were fairly sure that Saudi would try their best to keep it at around $80.
That may be, but their best may not be good enough. OPEC is becoming more and more irrelevant.
In inflation-adjusted terms?
Related to what and when? You’ve used that before and it turned out you were a little out on what the inflation adjustment actually meant.
Once we start getting serious about drilling and shale.
🙂
I’ll bookmark this.
What is the breakeven price for making shale cost effective? We should certainly be deep sea drilling more. The North and South Atlantic could do good things on an ongoing basis for the British economy.
OTOH – that Oil Price bubble looks ever more like the speculation some of your commentators said it wasn’t and couldn’t be 🙂
What is the breakeven price for making shale cost effective?
Less than forty dollars, perhaps thirty, is my understanding.
I’ll admit that I thought that once you factored in all costs it was around $60-$65, but I might be thinking of Tar Sands there which really needs nuclear to provide the power economically.
I could be wrong on that one though.
With luck, we’ll have some new breakthroughs in _sane_ bio-power (i.e. not burning food) and capacitor technology so we can start to move away from oil for road transport.
An integrated transportation infrastructure program would help the US too. But that might be a bridge (hehehe) too far.
IIRC, shale oil used to cost around $70/bbl, which was not competitive, but that in the last year or so, someone, perhaps Israelis, came up with a method to approximately halve that cost.
I don’t know about the Israelis, but I think that Shell has demonstrated a technique that allows it to be liquified underground and then pumped, which makes things not only a lot cheaper, but less harmful to the environment, because it no longer has to be strip mined. The biggest barrier now is political. Congress is still keeping the potential fields in CO and WY tied up.
Water will be a big issue in a lot of this. Produced salt water and usable water at the drill site are headaches now.
I see Oil is no longer below $90…
Just saying…
Well, just that it certainly should be but their are a lot of people now looking for somewhere for a return…